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so im going to bed soon but i will continue by btvs/ats watch tomorrow. but i have a question for the general public- should i watch ats s1x19 eternity? it seems like it might be interesting but idk
motherfucker this is fantasy. age gaps are a staple of the genre. its a goddamned mythical creature who does not exist in our world. like there's over 100 years difference between the characters. in what world is that actually happening. let us enjoy the fantasy of it.
but i think that while willoz's end is bittersweet it also leaves their futures open. im also going to be very normal about willow saying that part of her will always be waiting for oz. very normal.
“What do I do?” said Willow. She sounded so little in that moment. Suddenly, Jenny wasn’t imagining that woman in a clean-cut black suit and heels, but the little girl in striped sweaters and white tights. “If there’s no—word—for it? I like being a lesbian, or I thought I did, but I can’t call myself that if I like Oz. And I think I do.”
“You don’t need a word for it,” said Jenny simply.
“I need a word for it,” said Willow, a stress on the pronoun. “Maybe people in general don’t, but I do.”
“Maybe there isn’t one.”
“I need—” Willow’s breath hiccupped. “I need the words, a-and the rules. To make sure I don’t—”
Abruptly, Jenny knew who Willow needed to be talking to.
decided that, in lieu of tonight's blogging, now might be a nice time to post a tumblr-only exclusive that i've not yet figured out how to work into the canon of what you make! i would like to write a larger fic about willow's adventures at some point, & also figure out when this development will happen within the timeline, and once i do, i think i'll understand better how to work this thing in. (but it is definitely what happens.)
this requires no knowledge of my sprawling fic 'verse except for: it's an everybody lives/nobody dies au, jenny and giles are together with their eight-year-old son, this is a few years post-series.
read for -- giles and willow having frank and very loving discussions about sexuality, jenny calling willow "baby" because she's now a mom who does that kinda thing, briefest sleepiest calendiles child cameo!!!
~~~~~
Willow called at some godawful hour, late enough for it to be edging towards early-morning and for Jenny to be too tired to check the time. She happened to have been pulling an accidental all-nighter that had spun out from a few lines of code that just would not cooperate, so she managed to catch the phone before the second ring, hoping that it hadn’t woken up anyone upstairs. The shrill tone felt impossibly loud to her tired ears. “’lo?” she mumbled, rubbing at her eyes with her sleeve.
Anxiously, Willow said, “Jenny!” and then didn’t say anything else, her breathing nervous and rapid on the other end of the line.
“Willow.” Jenny was too sleepy to think. “You. Need something?”
“I don’t know! I just! Something happened and I can’t tell Buffy about it, and I can’t tell my mom, because she’ll think—well—she keeps saying she approves of the political implications of my lesbianism, so I feel like this is going to go over like a lead balloon, but I don’t know—I mean, I don’t think I’m straight again! It hasn’t—”
Jenny felt very much like this was a conversation that required her to be more awake than she was. Shuffling over to the kitchen table, she took a long sip of coffee. “The political implications?” she repeated skeptically.
“It’s just—we—” Willow took a wobbly breath in, then, in an exhaled confession: “I kissed Oz!”
For one bizarre, sleep-deprived moment, Jenny was convinced that she’d somehow been thrown back in time to 1997. “Oz?” she repeated. “Like, Oz, Oz?”
“Like Oz Oz!” Willow confirmed tearfully.
“Like your high school boyfriend Oz?”
“He was in Istanbul for some—thing—I don’t remember—and I wish I could say that we got drunk or high or something, but I was really only a little buzzed, and he was completely sober, and we were talking about everything we’ve been up to—he was the road manager for this really cool Eastern European band, and, and he’s been doing some networking with other werewolves, and oh, that’s part of why we met! We were talking about all of the complexities of connecting werewolves to resources that will help, and the stigma, and he’s really—well—he never really did much in high school, which I used to have such a complex about because I felt like he could do more than he was doing, but I guess I’ve changed because I just felt, I was so happy to see him doing things that mattered to him! And then that they also have a positive impact! And he’s still got that, that smile where when he looks at you, you sorta feel like you’re the only girl in the entire world! He still looks at me like I’m just the same, and I thought at first, you know, maybe that was why I felt all fuzzy and warm around him, because I’m a horrible person who gets off on validation, but then I started looking at him too and seeing that boy and—and—remembering—”
Jenny had absolutely no idea why any of this was a problem, but her ability to assertively interrupt the Willow-babble was significantly impaired when she was inches away from nodding off in between sentences. “Isn’t that good?” she tried, but Willow had not at all stopped talking.
“—and then we kissed and we actually did a little more than kissed, like, there was some over-the-clothes action and some grinding, except then when we stopped all of that, he walked me to my hotel! Like a gentleman! And he kissed me on the cheek and said he was really happy to share this moment with me, and who even does that??? What do I do now???? What if I’ve just—but I loved Tara so much! I still love Tara! I mean, I have NC-17 dreams about Tara, those wouldn’t happen if I’m straight! And I haven’t been with a guy since Oz, and I haven’t wanted to be with a guy since Oz, but now I want to—to call up Oz and be with him! Which, hello, so clingy, it was just one really nice month and then a whole bunch of kissing—”
“—wait, you’ve been spending a month with Oz in Istanbul and it’s only now become romantic?”
“WE WERE AT A CONFERENCE,” said Willow, as though this explained anything at all.
Jenny sat down at the kitchen table. “Willow—” God, she wanted to be asleep. “People can be bisexual,” she managed.
“But I’m not!”
“So you’re not into men?”
“But I am!”
She was going about this all wrong. “Baby. Are you into men or are you into Oz?”
A long silence. Then, timidly, “There’s not a difference, though, is there? You can’t be a real lesbian if—”
“Please God don’t turn into one of those witches,” said Jenny, who did not have the energy to be tactful. “Willow, there’s no way to be a real lesbian. There’s no manual. We define ourselves with the words that feel best for us, that’s what the queer community is about. What’s the word that feels best for you, right now?”
Another long silence. “I don’t know if the word is lesbian,” said Willow uncomfortably. “I don’t—I didn’t—really—question it? When it happened. It was Tara, first, and then Kennedy, and then a whole bunch of other girls, y’know, on account of the traveling, and then nobody at all for a little while, so I just—I wanted to kiss girls and I stopped looking at guys, and the only guy I ever noticed before Oz was Xander, and Xander, I didn’t know he was everything. They don’t tell you in high school what to do with someone who’s everything, they just say you should marry him if he’s a guy, but I don’t—I’ve never really wanted to marry Xander. We’re not like that. So I figured, Oz, he was just a fluke! Especially because of how everything with Tara happened, and I never thought any guy was pretty like I think girls are pretty, but—I don’t know. Oz is different. I don’t know how to explain it.”
Jenny leaned back against the wall, listening.
“I don’t know if the word is lesbian,” Willow repeated. “But—it doesn’t feel right to say that the word is bisexual, either. I’ve dated more girls than guys, now. I’ve built my life around imagining a girl there.”
“But Oz is different,” Jenny prompted.She was met with a tiny sigh in response. “Is that bad?”
“What do I do?” said Willow. She sounded so little in that moment. Suddenly, Jenny wasn’t imagining that woman in a clean-cut black suit and heels, but the little girl in striped sweaters and white tights. “If there’s no—word—for it? I like being a lesbian, or I thought I did, but I can’t call myself that if I like Oz. And I think I do.”
“You don’t need a word for it,” said Jenny simply.
“I need a word for it,” said Willow, a stress on the pronoun. “Maybe people in general don’t, but I do.”
“Maybe there isn’t one.”
“I need—” Willow’s breath hiccupped. “I need the words, a-and the rules. To make sure I don’t—”
Abruptly, Jenny knew who Willow needed to be talking to. “Baby, can you just stay on the line?” she asked gently. “Just for a second, I gotta—” and she set down the phone, stepping quietly out of the kitchen and into the unlit hallway, halfway up the stairs to the little landing between the first and second floor, where the bedroom door was still ajar.
Her baby was asleep in the middle of the bed, curled against Rupert like a little puppy; his dozing father’s arm was round his shoulders. Jenny leaned over the bed, carefully untangling a drowsy Art from Rupert. Art, always cuddly in slumber, whined; she ran her fingers through his hair, and he settled. “Rupert,” she murmured, shaking her guy awake. “Rupert.”
“Mmh?” Rupert stirred.
“Rupert, it’s Willow.”
Rupert’s eyes flew open. She saw the panic and gave his shoulders a reassuring squeeze, pressing her forehead briefly to his. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. She’s okay. Nothing bad. She just needs to talk to you.”
~~~~~
Willow waited on the line, listening to the crackly static, trying not to breathe too loudly for fear it would tumble into crying before Jenny came back. She heard rustling on the other end and held her breath, waiting, until Giles, his voice all rough and sleepy like it got during those old early morning research sessions, said, “Hello, Willow.”
“Giles,” Willow all but sobbed, feeling a rush of relief. “Did—did Jenny—tell you?”
“Some of it,” said Giles. “Just the loose pencil sketch, really. But I’d like to hear it from you.”
Maybe the Oz stuff wasn’t really why Willow had called Giles. “How do you know when to stop playing by the roles you made up when you were twenty-two and trying not to be the kind of asshole who destroys the universe?” she said, all in one breath. “I, I didn’t decide I was a lesbian because of the magics, but I decided it while I was in the magics, and I wanted to be good at being a lesbian, but now I’m worried that I’m not, if, if I kissed Oz and I liked it. I don’t know what the word is for that.”
“Bisexual?” said Giles.
“That’s what Jenny said but it isn’t that!” said Willow tearfully. “And lesbian doesn’t feel like it’s right either, even though it did for years before this!I don’t know what it is! I like girls and I like Oz, but I don’t like—I don’t want—I don’t think I want, but I don’t know—I wasn’t trying to look, after Tara, because I thought it was simple as—”
“Does there need to be a word for it?”
“That’s what Jenny said!”
A soft, tender laugh, the likes of which Willow hadn’t heard since she was in high school. She loved that laugh so much. It always meant that Giles knew the answer, and really, the problem wasn’t anything to be that afraid of, and five minutes from now, the world would feel okay again. “Willow,” said Giles. “Nothing in a person’s heart is ever finite. We are always—always—growing and changing past the words we used to describe ourselves five, ten, fifteen years ago.”
“But what if I—” Willow swallowed. “What if I change wrong?”
Giles didn’t answer for a couple of the worst seconds of Willow’s life. Finally, gently, he said, “Then you right yourself, if you can. Lean on others, if you can’t. We’re all muddling through. There’s no certainty that I can give you, as much as I wish that I could, but I can—” Now it was his turn to pause. A heavy one. “I can tell you that I love you,” he said, finally.
She had never heard him say that to her before. Not that directly, anyway. “I love you too, Giles,” Willow whispered. The whole thing felt faintly unreal: that she could say those words, and not snatch them back. Not watch his face contort uncomfortably as he tried to wriggle out of genuine emotional expression. “I just don’t wanna do what I did to everyone. And I don’t—if I was wrong, if I’m not—”
“I don’t think that you were wrong,” Giles countered. “You used the words that made sense to you at the time. Those words might not make sense with who you are now. Who you’re growing into. This is good, Willow. You questioning this is good, and healthy. I think…you need to become comfortable with the notion of not having that neat answer, or that label, if the notion of a label has become…restrictive.”
“I don’t want to not be a lesbian,” said Willow unsteadily. “It made everything make sense, when I found out about that word—”
“Does it help you now?”
Willow exhaled. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t want to not kiss Oz. It feels like I got turned all upside-down-y again.”
Giles was quiet again. Then he said, “When I was in my twenties, my group, it was all men, save one. Diedre. It hadn’t been intended, her being a part of the group. We’d all wanted a place to…to be ourselves, free of societal expectations.”
Willow’s heart flipped over. This was not something Giles had ever talked about. She’d known, of course—pieced it together through Ethan, and what she’d learned, later, about the kind of magic Giles got up to, but to hear it from him was completely different. She wanted to say something, affirm that she was there on the other end of the line, but she was halfway afraid that he would change his mind if he remembered that she was listening. She held her breath.
“I…didn’t mind the notion of including women within our group, even then.” Giles laughed softly. “It wasn’t something I talked about with the rest, but I wasn’t—I’ve never really—it’s always been about the person, for me, you see. Ethan and the rest, though, they…it wasn’t usual for them to, ah, prefer the company of a woman. They abhorred the very notion. But that was simply how special Diedre was. To, to all of us.”
Something tight and knotted in Willow’s chest was beginning to loosen. She sat down on the hotel bed, curling her fingers around the phone, listening like her life depended on it.
“You, you don’t need to have the right words for it, Willow,” said Giles gently. “Lord knows we didn’t know any of them. And I’d never—endorse—the other sort of things I got up to back then, but I, I think I’ve spent a lot of time refusing to engage with the parts of my life that have been…joyful. All because I was ashamed of the person that I was then.”
Willow wasn’t ashamed of high school Willow, exactly. It was just that sometimes it was hard to reconcile Willow-then with Willow-now, and that wasn’t even getting into the Willow-in-between. “So, for them, it was…guys plus the one exception,” she said uncertainly.
“Do you need to know what it was?” Giles’s tone was mildly pointed. Instructive.
“If I don’t—”
“What if you don’t?”
“I mean, that’s why I’ve been traveling,” said Willow, halfway timid. “To learn stuff.”
“And what have you learned?”
Willow closed her eyes, half-afraid of the answer. Oz had smiled at her in the light of the full moon, unencumbered, gentle. He’d listened to stories about Tara and Kennedy and everyone with thoughtful patience. He hadn’t made a single move. The kissing had happened by accident, and because she’d initiated it, and the nice thing about Oz was that he didn’t question that. He didn’t have a whole bunch of things to say about whoa, hold on, didn’t you go gay and change your mind about me? He just smiled at her, like he saw her, saw right down into her bones, and like what he saw was good.
And she’d missed him so much. The pinwheeling way he talked about things had baffled her when she was in high school, but now, after years of traveling, it was nice to be with someone who had just as many strange questions and quiet observations as she’d been collecting herself. She liked hearing him tell his stories. She liked him. She liked the person he’d become, and the person that she was with him. The people that they could maybe be together.
“I think I’ve learned that I wanna kiss Oz again,” she said, barely a whisper.
She could hear the smile in Giles’s voice. “That’s lovely, Willow,” he said. “I’m very happy for the both of you.”
~~~~~
Giles went back to bed. Jenny and Art had taken up just about all of it, making it nigh impossible for him to lie down comfortably. An attempt to nudge Art a bit further towards the middle was met by an unhappy, half-awake whine that positively tore at his heart, so he resigned himself to sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the bed for three minutes before Jenny, half awake, said, “Honey. Are you being stupid again?” and pulled Art against her like a teddy bear, clearing space for him in the middle.
“Don’t solve all of my problems for me,” said Giles, lying down and reaching to squeeze her shoulder. Their arms encircled Art, who turned his head towards his mother, soft dark curls against her sweater.
I’ve thought a lot about what Oz and Willow’s relationship would look like in a post-Tillow era. I’ve written them in a version of the world where Willow is bi-sexual, and in a version of the world where Willow is gay.
In the version of things where they try again as adults, they’ve both changed so much since they dated that they’re entirely different people. Sometimes they work out as a couple and sometimes they don’t. It depends on the story and what I’ve done with their characters between the end of the show and now-ish.
In the version of things where Willow is gay, they become total besties. Oz loves the fact that Willow has come into her own and found someone who makes her happy (whether it be Tara, Kennedy, or someone else). Willow is glad Oz has owned his wolf side and learned to embrace it. Both of them use their powers to help others and they often work together. Oz will do anything to protect Willow and whoever she loves. He and Tara take a while to warm up to one another because when they met the first time Oz almost killed her. But Oz gets all Tara’s obscure nerdy references, and Tara appreciates the fact that Oz is content to sit in comfortable silence and lets her take her time getting her thoughts out when she’s nervous or excited.
Willow and Oz just love each other no matter what the circumstances, even if they’re not romantic partners. There’s a deep appreciation and respect on both sides, and I love writing them in any scenario. I’ll post some of these if I can get them in some sort of shape. They tend to be part of larger stories, so I’d have to polish those stories first.
Sidenote: I did not forget about Kennedy, but she was sort of underdeveloped in my opinion and I haven’t fully developed her yet in my head.
